I just read a story about a man who left home in 1991, going missing.
About thirty years later, a stranger drove up to the home and dropped the man off. He was back, and his relatives were obviously shocked. The guy was now in his 90's, and wearing the same clothes as when he'd left. He claimed to have no memory of where he'd been for the past three decades.
Reading this story makes the imagination run wild with possibilities of where the man had been, and how this could have happened. Some strange government experiment? Alien abduction? Did the guy cross over to another dimension and just now return?
Digging deeper, there are more mundane answers to be found - but that interests me far less than the initial version of the story.
Rip Van Winkle was a character who fell asleep for 20 years and returned to his life, having missed the American Revolution, finding a very different environment.
Captain America was a World War 2 hero who was frozen in ice and thawed out in “the modern age”, the early 1960's originally. This gets more impactful on the character in modern versions in my opinion, when the time Cap was frozen is stretched out to 75 years in the newer comics and movie versions.
There was a Twilight Zone episode where a World War Two pilot and plane showed up in the 1960's-era episode. I saw that once and it was a bit funny to me, someone who could not easily understand the difference between life in the 1940's and 1960's.
A different version of this story was in “Yesterday's Enterprise”, one of the best episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation. A starship appears that was lost 20 years ago. Our heroes on the Enterprise realize that this 20-years-lost ship has come forward in time and changed the timeline. Just like the in the Twilight Zone episode, this ship must be sent back to correct the timeline.
The movie “Forever Young” has this kind of story, where Mel Gibson is put into cryogenic sleep and comes out after about 50 years.
Next Generation outdoes this one in an early episode where the Enterprise crew finds a cryogenic ship drifting in space and thaws out three people from the 1980's or so, who've been asleep for 400 years.
Philip J. Fry in Futurama outdoes THEM by accidentally getting himself frozen for 1000 years and waking up in a vastly different sci-fi future.
Obviously this can be a good setup for a science fiction story. It's a cool idea - but it's cool because of the human element. A person being transported out of time and being isolated in a completely different environment can be a great look at character, and maybe a commentary on the changing world - or it can take a look at what happens when a loved one goes away, and then comes back, and how that impacts everyone.
Anyway, that's it for me - I'm gonna get some shuteye. Hopefully measured only in hours!
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Did I Miss Anything?
Banes at 12:00AM, Aug. 15, 2024
5 likes!
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marcorossi at 7:30AM, Aug. 17, 2024
Sorry the Woody Allen movie was Sleeper, not Bananas
Ozoneocean at 7:03AM, Aug. 17, 2024
Buck Rogers :)
marcorossi at 5:46AM, Aug. 16, 2024
Also Urashima Taro in Japan. Also "Bananas" by Woody Allen.
Ozoneocean at 2:30AM, Aug. 16, 2024
@Bravo- You are correct LOL!!!
bravo1102 at 2:25AM, Aug. 16, 2024
@Ozoneocean: imagine a B-52 pilot from 1964 waking up in 2024 to find his old one is still in service. 😂 Check the serial number -- same air frame!
Ozoneocean at 5:14PM, Aug. 15, 2024
Planet of the Apes is this type of story. That's the big reveal :D SPOILER!!!
Ozoneocean at 5:13PM, Aug. 15, 2024
@Bravo- It shows how slow the current world exists that if an airforce person from the late 70s got frozen in time and work up now almost 50 years later he's still find the US flying the same old F-16, F-15, c-130, etc... the Russians are still the enemy, they still have mig-25 and Mil-mi Hind Ds...
mishi_hime at 2:37PM, Aug. 15, 2024
I could use a nap. Wake me up when election season is over lol.
bravo1102 at 9:06AM, Aug. 15, 2024
The original Rip Van Winkle had the henpecked husband, the cursed other(Hudson's cursed crew standing in for faerie) and politics. It's actually an American retelling of the old Faerie mound story. Go into the mound and spend a night with the elfs and it's decades later. Rip Van Winkle has the great contrast of colonial NY of the 1750s and post Revolutionary War NY. Very American and Washington Irving was trying to create an American mythology. It's a great device to contrast two highly different worlds that are only a few decades apart. One of the first truly science fiction versions was "When the Sleeper Wakes" by H.G. Wells. And of course who can forget this as the plot device for the great satire "Idiocracy"?
dpat57 at 3:16AM, Aug. 15, 2024
Yesterday's Enterprise delivers the extra joy of a dead character returning and being profoundly affected by what she learns of herself in what, to her, is the alternative timeline. And also the likelihood that Enterprise-C will be destroyed when it goes back. Despite which, its crew volunteers to return. As Captain Garrett says, they didn't like the idea of running out in the middle of a fight. To me that is the very essence of human adventure in Sci-Fi. And the reason it's everybody's favorite TNG episode.
PaulEberhardt at 2:20AM, Aug. 15, 2024
The Rip van Winkle plot always works like a charm, so to speak. It's a coming home after a long journey plot on steroids, and we all know this moment of disbelief when the son of a good friend you remembered as a small boy picks you up from the station in his car or something. My point is, the setup seems outlandish on the surface, but it's in fact very relatable. Now Science Fiction is an ideal genre for this. I personally prefer those rare stories where keeping the timeline intact is not that much of a concern because all possible timelines exist in parallel or something. You can avoid a lot of paradoxes and other headscratchers that way. On the other hand, that TNG episode IS awesome.
bravo1102 at 12:40AM, Aug. 15, 2024
In the Twilight Zone, the pilot and plane were from World War One arriving at a 1960s Air Force base full of supersonic jets in a biplane barely capable of 100 mph. Great episode on how the past and future were interconnected and he had to go back so he future he saw would happen. Just like Yesterday's Enterprise. The 1701C had to go back or the prime tikeline would never happen because this one was wrong. Everyone suspected it but Guinan could articulate it. It shows up in most top ten Star Trek episode lists.